Anxiety-Driven Motivation

A person driving really hard to make a car trip go faster would save more
time by occasionally forgoing a trip, taking a better route, driving at a
better time, or simply living closer to where they're going. A person who
spends a lot of time putting stuff away in their house would probably be
better off putting into storage all the things they don't use regularly or
at all. A lot of people keep so much stuff in their rooms that it literally
can't be clean and the best they can do is shuffle it around the room
occasionally. The reason people have these behaviors is anxiety-driven
efficiency.

The person always has a baseline level of anxiety which they alleviate by
doing things. But by alleviating it in this way they end up becoming
addicted to the anxiety. Ironically, people who are big into anxiety-driven
efficiency tend to be very inefficient. This is because they are always
focused on efficiency at the small scale and never feel a need to examine
the large scale or long term. As long as their anxiety is beaten down they
feel they've done what they need to. However, there is typically a problem
when a person tries to stop being anxiety-driven. They realize that without
the anxiety in place to motivate them they have no other source of
motivation. Sure they can logically see what they need to do and why to do
it but they still aren't motivated. A person who's spent all their life
motivated by anxiety hasn't had the need to develop more mature forms of
motivation. So, if a person breaks the habit of anxiety they'll typically
be unmotivated for many years. This is usually called being "burnt
out".